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“Look, if we can’t find it, we can just go. It’s not important—”
KYOSHI.
She screamed as a bolt of pain drove into her skull from temple to temple. It seized her by the neck and scoured her vision into a blur. Her hands went limp and lost their grip on the saddle. Kyoshi keeled over the edge and fell off the bison, her ears filled with the sound of her own name.
She hurt the entire way down. A sharpness like daggers bounced from one side of her head to the other. It found an outlet down her spine where it could ransack her body. She was barely aware of how fast and far she was plummeting.
KYOSHI.
A man with a deep voice called to her, his words shredded by the wind speeding past her ears. It wasn’t Jinpa.
KYOSHI.
The shock of cold salt water as she hit the ocean was a relief from the heated agony. She lost her sense of up and down. Her limbs drifted weightlessly. When she opened her eyes, there was no sting.
Out of the endless blue, a figure drifted in front of her, mirroring her slackness in the water, as much of a prisoner as she. The shape of it was hazy, an ink painting dipped in a river, but she knew who the apparition clad in Water Tribe furs was.
Avatar Kuruk.
—KYOSHI—NEED YOUR HELP TO—
The voice of Kyoshi’s immediate predecessor in the Avatar cycle was much louder in the water, his native-born element. It thundered between her ears.
—KYOSH
I—YOU MUST—I CAN’T—IT CAN PASS—
A hand plunged through Kuruk’s body, dissolving it into the surrounding liquid like thin syrup. It grabbed Kyoshi’s lapels and tugged her toward the surface. The salt water, which hadn’t bothered her until now, dug into her eyes with a vengeance. Forgetting she was still below the surface, she gasped for air and got her throat splashed for her troubles. If Kuruk’s spell could have kept her from drowning indefinitely, it was broken now.
Jinpa kicked toward the rippling sunlight, holding tightly to her with one hand. At first Kyoshi tried to help him by swimming upward herself. It took her an embarrassingly long time floundering like that to remember she was a Waterbender surrounded by water. A quick raise of her arms and a rolling bubble carried her and Jinpa to the surface.
They burst into the air and emptied the contents of their lungs. Kyoshi hacked and coughed until she could breathe once more. Yingyong floated in the water nearby, growling in worry.
“Are you all right!?” Jinpa sputtered. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” Kyoshi said. The headache had mostly dissipated into the ocean. “I just lost my balance and fell.”
“Just fell?” Jinpa was as visibly upset with her as an Airbender could be. He was raising his voice. He was frowning at her.
“It was Kuruk.” Kyoshi squeezed the sides of her head to dull the lingering throb. Her bending spared them the need to tread. “He was trying to tell me something.”
“Avatar Kuruk!? You . . . you communed with Avatar Kuruk? You looked like you were having a fit!”
“It’s usually not this bad. It wasn’t so painful the last couple of times.”
Jinpa’s jaw threatened to unhinge and fall into the ocean. “These episodes have happened before and you haven’t told me? Kyoshi, an Avatar communing with their past selves is supposed to be a hallowed experience, not a life-threatening seizure!”
Kyoshi grimaced. She knew. She knew exactly how lacking her spiritual connections were. She’d found out through trial and error.
The Water Tribe Avatar had manifested before her in his complete form exactly once in the Southern Air Temple, where he had the gall to ask her for help before dissipating just as quickly. She’d been left in a lurch, not knowing what to do with such a useless vision.
But the experience did remind her she had access to a trove of worldly advice in the form of her past lives. A vast wealth of experience and wisdom lay at her fingertips, if she could only master her own spirit.
Kyoshi had tried reaching out to previous generations of the cycle by meditating in the sacred places of the Southern Air Temple, wayside shrines of the Earth Kingdom dedicated to the great Avatars like Yangchen and Salai, spots of natural beauty atop mountains and next to flowing rivers. She wasn’t expecting it to be easy. She’d read that spiritualists had taken lifetimes to gain the skills of meditation, trance, and enlightenment. Kyoshi had fully prepared herself to be greeted by the silence of failure when she tried to commune with her past selves.
What she wasn’t ready for, though, was getting jagged fragments of Kuruk.
And only of Kuruk.
